Field of the Invention
The invention described herein generally relates to Internet-enabled telephone devices, software and operating systems—both wireless and landline—capable of determining and blocking calls from unwanted communicators.
Description of the Related Art
Telephone users may receive calls from callers such users generally and collectively agree are unwanted—typically because the caller is unsolicited, such as a telemarketer who is sequentially or randomly calling upon the audience and is not one of such users' typical known callers with which such users' have a pre-existing relationship. This is particularly true in mobile communication systems where mobile telephone users will often be interrupted at any time by unwanted calls. In addition, unsolicited messages may be left in voice mail systems of users who configure their landline and wireless telephone devices to forward their unanswered calls to such voice mail systems to answer their unanswered phone calls. Voice mail left by unwanted callers is an especially expensive problem for users who must retrieve messages from the voice mail system via cell phones, long distance calls, or transcriptions. Voice mail left by unwanted callers causes users to spend real dollars (air time, per minute charges, toll free charges to enterprise, voicemail transcription, etc.) and waste precious time on messages to which they do not want to listen.
Current solutions for identifying unwanted solicitors rely on a predetermined list of unwanted solicitors. For example, caller identification (ID) systems allow recipients to screen the source of incoming calls, but many callers can either “spoof” a fake number to avoid recognition or block their Caller ID information entirely so that no information is provided to a recipient about the caller. Call-blocking features allow recipients to block callers from specific phone numbers and those that intentionally block their calling information. Government telemarketing restriction lists allow recipients who take certain specific steps to be listed as people who do not wish to be called by telemarketers, but such lists are not fully effective to avoid unwanted telephone calls.
The above solutions do not adequately provide full protection from unwanted phone calls. Accordingly, additional technology is still needed in order to enable effective call blocking.